Samuel Morse’s world-changing invention

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

ENLARGE 

Samuel Morse was a painter before he was an inventor. His self-portrait. 

After joining lectures on electricity, Morse secretly began working on a way of encoding and sending messages. There had been experiments with sending electricity through wires before Morse was born. And there had been telegraph machines for years already, mostly in Europe. But these were basically semaphore machines with too many wires and complex signals that couldn’t travel far. Operators sometimes used telescopes to see the messages. [National Geographic] continue ...